SCO Now Wants $5b from IBM

The SCO Group wants to amend its 11-month-old suit against IBM and substitute charges of copyright infringement for trade secret violations and up its
demand for damages from $3 billion to a minimum of $5 billion, a nice round number.

Along with the trade secrets charge goes SCO's claims that IBM dipped into SCO's own OpenServer and UnixWare widgetry on behalf of Linux, not only
code, but also know-how, concepts, idea, methodologies, standards, specifications, programming, techniques, architecture, design and schematics.

The move leaves SCO down to proving it owns derivative AIX and Dynix code that IBM claims it owns and that IBM put that derivative code in Linux.

SCO filed the amended suit with the federal court in Salt Lake City last week but it's unclear whether the thing's going to fly. SCO needs the
magistrate doing the housekeeping for the trial judge to approve the change and so far she has said nary a word about it in public, not even at the
hearing she held last Friday where IBM and SCO argued over their motions to compel evidence from each other.